‘History’, as Marx said, ‘repeats itself: first as tragedy, then as farce’. Fortunately for us, this time round the farce was written by Dario Fo!Guest reviewer (for Hastings Online Times) Stuart Christie attended the opening night of Dario Fo’s Accidental Death of An Anarchist at Hastings’ Stables Theatre.

The action begins, we are told, shortly after an actual series of coordinated bomb outrages in Milan and Rome on 12 December 1969, explosions that killed 16 and injured over 120 random victims in what became known as the Strategy of Tension. The subsequent police investigation into the ‘bombings’ (the latest in an ongoing series of alleged ‘anarchist-leftist’ attacks which began the previous year) was led by Chief Inspector Luigi Calabresi and his boss Chief Superintendent Antonio Allegra of Milan’s Special Branch (Questura). On the night of the explosion — and the following day — over 100 anarchists were arrested, 27 of whom were taken to San Vittorio prison, the rest being held for interrogation in Milan police headquarters in the Via Fatebenefratelli.

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Anarchism

Anarchism swept us away completely, because it demanded everything of us and promised everything to us. There was no remote corner of life that it did not illumine ... or so it seemed to us ... shot though with contradictions, fragmented into varieties and sub-varieties, anarchism demanded, before anything else, harmony between deeds and words
- Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary